Fred Adams is a Mammal
Taken completely out of context, this Ken Aizawa comment regarding the localization and multiple realization of cognitive functions is somewhat amusing:
Consider my friend Fred Adams, who has red hair.
I claim “Fred is a mammal” does not entail “Fred has red hair”.
In other news, Fred Adams has written a very nice review of Andrew Brook and Kathleen Akins (eds.), Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Vanity compels my quoting Fred on my chapter, “Action-Oriented Representation“:
Pete Mandik also recounts the enactivists’ views of perception, as against the representational theory. Enactivists, such as O’Regan and Noe, postulate that perception is the product of sensori-motor knowledge (289). Mandik explains why this is a threat to the representationalists (290). Perception is underdetermined by sensory inputs and has to be supplemented by sensori-motor outputs. Mandik argues that even perception based essentially in part on efference copy information is consistent with the representational theory of perception (292-3). Imperative representational content can figure in determining the sensory input content of a perceptual representation. Mandik shows that his account is implementable in a robot, consistent with evolutionary cognitive models, (296-7) and instantiated in human vision (299).
Take that, enactivists!
March 2nd, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Dangit, Pete. Fred is very self-conscious about being a mammal and about having red hair! I should not have mentioned it, but now you are spreading it around!
March 3rd, 2007 at 9:55 am
As an enactivist, my testicles swell from that kicking.